Virus E-Mail After Newsgroup Post

  • Thread starter Thread starter Don
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D

Don

I've had very little problems with spam and e-mail viruses
until after I posted a message on a Microsoft newsgroup.
The day after I posted my first newsgroup message I
suddently started getting about 100 virus e-mails every
day, and have been ever since. I guess I shouldn't have
used my real e-mail in the posting, but I was stupid
enough to trust that Microsoft had security in place to
prohibit this.

Has anyone else had this problem?
 
A lot of us have had this problem and to solve it we need
microsoft to remove the email addresss of everyone who has
posted. But I dont know if they are going to or not. If
its any help to you in about three months your post will
have left the forums and you wont get anymore.
 
James wrote / skrev:
A lot of us have had this problem and to solve it we need
microsoft to remove the email addresss of everyone who has
posted. But I dont know if they are going to or not. If
its any help to you in about three months your post will
have left the forums and you wont get anymore.
Click to expand...

The emails originate from infected machines. If you report them to the
originating IP-adress owners (usually ISP's) they can track down the
user in question and help them uninfect their machine. This is the way
to stop theese emails. If you just report 2 or 3 of theese you will have
helped out. See http://www.spamcop.org for information about how to find
the originating IP-adress if you don't know how to go about that.

- Veronica Loell
 
Please clarify. Lets say for example that I may have a worm on my computer.
Are you saying that I may be the one unknowingly sending out the 145K-156K
e-mails to everyone in the Newsgroup?
 
Taishi wrote / skrev:
Please clarify. Lets say for example that I may have a worm on my computer.
Are you saying that I may be the one unknowingly sending out the 145K-156K
e-mails to everyone in the Newsgroup?
Click to expand...

If your computer is infected with the SWEN-worm, or another like it,
then yes.

- Veronica Loell
 
This has absolutely nothing to do with Microsoft security and is not at all
under Microsoft's control. It is entirely under your control.

When you post here, you are actually posting to public Usenet newsgroups.
The posts here are then replicated to thousands of other usenet servers
around the internet that are not under Microsoft's control. Any one of
these servers can be used to harvest email addresses, since the newsgroups
are public and must by nature be accessible to everyone with no password or
authentication. Microsoft didnt' invent the way Usenet works, nor does it
make a lot of sense for them to munge people's email addresses. [It would
be nice if they explained to users how and why one might munge an email
address before posting, as a courtesy to novice users that are not familiar
with Usenet common best practices.]

It's very much like you were in a crowd, and you told your friend your
credit card number, and some third party overheard you. You wouldn't blame
your friend for failing to protect your credit card number, as protecting it
would be your responsibility as the person speaking the numbers. It should
be obvious by now that 1) anything posted to a public area on the internet
is public, and 2) assuming that you can abandon common sense security
practices because you assume someone else has some sort of protection in
place gets you into trouble.
 
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